The Economy

Angela Eagle Excerpts

Monday 27th April 2020 Commons Chamber

[Rishi Sunak]

I thank my hon. Friend for his thoughtful comments. I know he has put a lot of personal time and energy into thinking about these things, and I welcome his engagement with me. He makes very interesting suggestions. As the Prime Minister said this morning, there will be gradual refinements to the social and economic restrictions, and my hon. Friend is right to highlight that that is exactly how the process will work, whether that is the restrictions or, indeed, how we remove some of the economic interventions that we have put in place.

[Ms Angela Eagle (Wallasey) (Lab) [V]]

The whole House will welcome the Chancellor’s announcement of his micro-loans scheme—the bounce-back loans—that he just made in his statement, but will he admit that the CBILS loans that he announced are still proving slow, overly complex and bureaucratic? Will he look again to see what he can do to simplify that scheme so that more of the £330 billion of potential loans that he set out in his first announcements can actually get to where they need to be to save huge swathes of our economy?

[Rishi Sunak]

The hon. Member is absolutely right. I am striving to make the process as seamless and as quick as possible. We made some improvements a couple of weeks ago—removing guarantees and changing some things on the back end—which have already made a difference. More than 20,000 CBILS loans have now been issued and there are 40,000 applications that the banks are working through. The acceptance rate remains high at over 80%, but there are further tweaks that we have been putting in place over the past week. Information on that will be outlined later. It is largely technical, administrative and regulatory, but I believe those changes will continue to accelerate the pace of CBILS loans and, like the hon. Member, I think we all share that aspiration.